34
“Cool enough for you?” he asked.
“For now,” Nell said. She took a sip of cold Budweiser from the can. Terry Adams, the air-conditioner repairman, had finally gotten back to her on her cell phone number, and told her he could work her into his schedule. The problem was it had to be this afternoon. Could Nell have the super let him in? He understood why she wouldn’t want somebody she’d never met left alone in her apartment to repair her air conditioner. Could she get a friend or relative to be there while he worked? Maybe the super would stay. Terry wouldn’t be insulted, he said; he didn’t want to be responsible if, after he left, something seemed to be broken or missing.
Nell didn’t have a friend or relative who’d sit in her sweltering apartment and watch this guy work. And her building’s super wasn’t even on the premises most of the time. She’d been considering reporting him to Missing Persons. She was driving when she got Terry’s call, on her way to interview another of the Palmetto case jurors. She really didn’t want to go. The juror would be like the last three, deficient in any fresh knowledge of the Justice Killer investigation, and already sufficiently frightened by what they did know. If JK’s goal was to scare hell out of the city, he was doing a good job.
“I’ll meet you there in half an hour and let you in,” she said to Terry.
“That’ll work. I’ll probably need only a couple of hours at most.”
So here sat Nell on her living room sofa, observing her window air conditioner being operated on instead of pursuing a serial killer.
Terry had the unit on a blue tarp he’d spread on the floor so as not to dirty the carpet. He wasn’t the repairman of TV sitcoms, overweight with low-slung work pants. He was slim and muscular, wearing a tight black T-shirt, jeans and moccasins. His hair was a curly brown and slightly mussed above a high forehead and symmetrical features. He had brown eyes with laugh crinkles at their corners, and was clean shaven, with a chiseled jaw and cleft chin. Quite the package. It figured he was an actor as well as an air conditioner repairman-or was it the other way around?
She’d given him a can of beer, too, and watched as he put down a crescent wrench for a moment and took a sip, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Nell found herself wishing she were wearing something other than her shapeless blue skirt and blazer and thick-soled black cop shoes. She knew she had nicely turned ankles, but not in these clod-hoppers.
She scooted to the corner of the sofa, so she could see over Terry’s shoulder, and crossed her legs. “How’s it look?”
He didn’t glance back at her. The hair at the nape of his neck was curling and wet with perspiration in a way she liked. She was sweating herself.
“Not bad,” he said, exchanging beer can for wrench. “This brass tube”-he tapped a curved, rusty tube with the wrench-“is leaking coolant, needs to be replaced. You got a couple of leaky connections, too.”
“I didn’t notice anything dripping.”
“The coolant evaporated before it ran over. But your filter needs changing. Condensation was building in your drip pan and running down the outside of the building.”
“Sounds serious.” Nell had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
He turned and smiled at her. The way his lips curled made him look kind of sardonic, like a fifties movie matinee idol who could rape his way through a movie and everybody liked it. “It isn’t. I’ll only be here about an hour.”
He’d set up a paint-splattered old box fan he no doubt used to cool himself on the job, but he’d angled it to blow not on him but on Nell. It hummed steadily, with a faint clinking sound, sending a slight breeze over her.
“Want me to turn that to a higher speed?” he asked, pointing at the fan with his wrench.
“It’s fine the way it is, thanks. Are you really an actor?”
“Don’t I seem like one?”
“You seem like a man who knows a lot about air conditioners.”
Again the smile. Right at her heart. “Got you fooled.” He bent back to his task, gave the wrench a turn, and removed the rusty curved piece of brass tubing. “I’ve been in some plays, done a few commercials. Way I met cops, I co-starred a couple of years ago in Safe and Loft.”
“I remember it. Didn’t see it, though. It was on Broadway.”
“Well, close to Broadway. It was a genuine hit, though. Ran for over a year. I played a cop, and I did my research by riding in radio cars with some of the cops in the Two-Oh Precinct. I learned about folks like you, and about breaking and entering, too. The professional burglars. I was a cop in the play, but I was also the stand-in for the actor who played the burglar. I take my research seriously, so I got to be pretty good with a lock pick. Got to know a lot of cops, and made contacts for my sideline, which is repairing household appliances.”
“That’s how I got your name. You must do a lot of work for cops.”
“Yeah. This time of year, mostly air conditioners.”
“Maybe you should join the NYPD,” Nell said.
“I thought about it.” He sounded serious. “But after getting a taste of the job, I realized how difficult it is. And dangerous. Theater critics are tough, but none of them has ever taken a shot at me.” He stopped work for a few seconds and gave her an appraising look that raised goose bumps on her arms. “I appreciate what you do.”
Could you ever, Nell found herself thinking. “Acting’s gotta be hard on the ego, though, right? I mean, the competition must be tremendous. There aren’t millions of kids all over the world dreaming of being cops the way they dream of being movie stars.”
“I work,” Terry said, “even if I have to repair appliances between what I consider my real occupation. Yeah, it’s a struggle, and you get kicked in the teeth regularly, but then, every now and then, you know it’s worth it. Probably not so unlike being a cop.”
“I don’t recall ever getting any applause for being a cop,” Nell said. “Not the way you must have.”
He laughed. “I got some at that. Hated to turn in the uniform when the show closed.”
He tightened some joints with the wrench, then let it clatter back into his toolbox and withdrew a small acetylene torch. “Gotta heat something up,” he said, “do some soldering. Then I’ll recharge the unit, change the filter, and be out of here. I’ll be able to make an audition, and you can return to chasing the bad guys.”
“No rush,” Nell said. “At the moment, no bad guys close enough to chase.”
He gave her a sideways glance as the torch popped and its nozzle emitted a narrow, hot flame. Another grin came her way. Then he adjusted the blue flame and began soldering. “Your name, Nell, is it short for Nelly?”
“It is, but nobody’s called me Nelly in years.” She waited for him to comment that it was a nice name, but he didn’t. The only sound was the humming and clinking of the old box fan, the hissing of the torch. The torch reminded her of the one the Tavern on the Green waiter had used to scorch the creme brulee, which brought to mind a comparison between Jack Selig and Terry Adams. Nell wasn’t sure she was ready for a sixtyish lover. It might be too much like being in her sixties herself, rushing the season. Selig was certainly sophisticated and handsome-and rich. Terry was certainly sensual and handsome-and still relatively poor. Maybe Terry was Selig twenty years ago.
Nell was Nell now, and now wasn’t twenty years ago.
Terry had finished with the blow torch and was fitting a new filter into place. When he straightened up, he wiped his hands on the outer thighs of his Levi’s so they’d be dry, getting ready to hoist the air conditioner back into the window frame. He was going to get away.
Unless Nell’s refrigerator needed repair. It didn’t seem to be keeping the milk as cold as it used to.
She watched silently as he slid the heavy unit back into the window, muscles flexing in his corded arms. He began to anchor it to the frame with a screwdriver.
“Aren’t you going to try it first?” she asked.
“It’ll work,” he said. “I knew exactly what it needed.”
When he was finished, he switched the air conditioner on and turned it to high. It ran quietly and more powerfully than it ever had. Nell could see the brass pull chain on the nearby table lamp swaying in the artificial
